An Introduction to Power

The currency of existence

What is power? We speak of it constantly—political power, personal power, the power of nature, the power of money. But when we reach for a definition, something slips through our fingers. Is power the ability to make others do what we want? The capacity to resist being moved? The force that flows through institutions and shapes our lives without our consent?

Perhaps we have been asking the wrong question. Perhaps power is not something we have, but something we are.

An old conversation

The question of power has haunted human thought for millennia. In ancient India, thinkers conceived of shakti—the dynamic, creative energy of the cosmos that one could align with through discipline. In China, Laozi spoke of de, the power that flows from harmony with the way of nature, while Confucius located power in moral authority and ritual order. Both traditions recognised something our modern usage often obscures: power is not merely force, but capacity.

The Greeks gave us the distinction that still shapes our thinking. Aristotle distinguished dunamis, potentiality—the capacity to become—from energeia, actuality—the exercise of that capacity. An acorn has the power to become an oak, but this power remains latent until conditions allow its expression.

Later thinkers would take this in different directions. Machiavelli, observing the brutal realities of Renaissance politics, argued that effective power required virtu—not moral virtue but the skill to master fortune. Hobbes saw power as a resource to be surrendered to a sovereign to escape the war of all against all. Nietzsche, by contrast, identified power as the fundamental drive of all life: the will to power, not as domination over others, but as self-overcoming, expansion, creation.

In our own time, Foucault shifted our attention entirely. Power, he argued, is not a possession held by kings or governments. It is woven into the fabric of institutions, discourses, and practices—in prisons, schools, hospitals, scientific disciplines. It produces knowledge, shapes identities, and constitutes our very sense of self.

Each of these perspectives captures something true. But none of them, perhaps, goes deep enough.

A foundational shift

Consider the etymology of the word 'power'. It derives from the Latin posse: 'to be able'. Its root morphemes suggest 'capacity' or 'ability'. This is not one definition among many. This is the essential meaning from which all others derive.

What if we took this seriously? What if power is, quite simply, ability?

This apparently modest shift carries radical implications. If power is ability, then it is not a substance to be hoarded, a resource to be transferred, or a property to be possessed. It is not something one can 'have' in any simple sense. It is a capacity inherent in any entity that exists—a rock has the ability to resist pressure, a cell the ability to metabolise and divide, a person the ability to think and act, a society the ability to coordinate and reproduce itself.

To be is to have some power—the ability to continue being.

Notice what this does to our conventional understanding. The question 'Who has power?'—which always invites comparisons, rankings, and zero-sum thinking—gives way to a different question: 'What is the capacity to do?' Power becomes relational, contextual, specific. It is always ability in relation to something: to affect, to respond, to persist, to transform.

A single electron has power: the ability to attract or repel. A tree has power: the ability to photosynthesize, draw water, respond to light. These are not different kinds of power, but different expressions of the same fundamental reality—capacity actualised in specific contexts.

What follows

This reframing dissolves several ancient puzzles. The paradox of powerlessness, for example, ceases to be mysterious. If power is ability, then powerlessness is simply the absence, limitation, or impediment of a specific ability. It is not a negative force to be defined against but the condition of constrained capacity.

More profoundly, this understanding builds relationality into the very core of power. Power is never an isolated attribute. It emerges at the interface where difference meets difference—where what was separate comes together. A positive charge creates no current on its own; a voice generates no dialogue in a vacuum; an isolated mind produces no innovation. Power manifests only in the conference of difference.

This also transforms how we understand change. Change is not caused by an external force acting upon a passive recipient, but by the coordination, conflict, or alignment of multiple abilities. A tree does not grow because force acts upon it, but because it has the ability to photosynthesise, draw water, and respond to light—abilities that, in their coordinated expression, produce growth.

When we get it wrong

Yet we persistently misunderstand power. We treat it as a commodity to be accumulated, a weapon to be wielded, a territory to be controlled. This is not merely an intellectual error. It has consequences.

When we conceive of power as domination, we organise our institutions to concentrate it. We create hierarchies that reward competitive accumulation and punish collaborative capacity. We design systems that hoard power in the hands of a few, even as we pay lip service to its distribution. The result is not strength but fragility—systems that depend on concentrated control and collapse when that control falters.

The corruption Lord Acton warned about is not inherent to power itself, but to the competitive struggle to monopolise it. Power as ability is ontologically neutral. It becomes pathological only when the conference of difference collapses into zero-sum competition rather than positive-sum collaboration. The problem is not that we have power, but that we organise its expression in ways that breed corruption.

The question that remains

If power is ability, then our ethical task becomes clear: to foster conditions where abilities can be realised through collaborative conference rather than competitive struggle. This means designing systems that reward cooperation over domination, that regulate against concentrated accumulation, that recognize that sustainable power emerges not from control over others but from conference with them.

What kind of power do you exercise in your daily life? Not the abstract power of influence or status, but the concrete abilities you actually possess—to think, to speak, to act, to create, to connect. Are these abilities being realised through conference with others, or are they being channelled into competitive struggles that diminish everyone?

This is not a question with a comfortable answer. It is an invitation to pay attention.

The Gospel of Being

by John Mackay

Discover the first principle of existence in 30 seconds.

Discover the book